The F-35 Lightning
II is one of the most expensive weapons program ever and has been plagued with
cost overruns and delays since it launched. New details on the generator
failure that caused an emergency landing and the subsequent grounding of the
F-35 fleet have been unveiled.

Defense News reports that the generator failure that affected test
aircraft AF-4 has been determined to be the result of an improper maintenance technique that goes
along with a new generator layout in some of the newer F-35 fighters. Once the
problem was traced to the new generator layout in newer aircraft, the F-35s using
the older generator layout were cleared to resume flight operations.

The earlier aircraft that resumed flight operations included three F-35As and
four F-35Bs. Defense News reports that the maintenance procedure
has now been revised and that the full fleet of F-35s are now back to
operation. The aircraft with the older generator layout resumed flights
on March 14. The cause of the generator failure in the test aircraft was traced
back to an excess of oil inside the generator.

The excess oil circulation inside the generator after maintenance caused the
generator to overheat and fail. Lockheed claims that the loss of flight time
has not impacted the test flight schedule. The F-35 program is still ahead of
its flight schedule for the month.

quote: Sorry Dog, but do you really think that? B-2A - 60,000lb payload F-35C - 3000lb internally + 15000lb externally For them to retain their limited stealth, you would need 20 F-35C's for each B-2A that you wanted to supplant and they would be limited to 6 500lb bombs.

Yes, I really think so. The B-2 flies from an air conditioned hanger in Missouri while the F35 would likely come from a much more logistically friendly hangar...so once the B2 has entered the target area the flight of F35's delivered their ordinance 4 hours ago and are back at base...and then the B2 probably needs 300 maintenance hours and RAM repair since it just did a 24 hour flight...and there's only 20 of those hanging around so any substitution of the workload for lower hour airframes would be a good thing. The F-117's which also carried 2 2k pounders didn't seem to suffer from a shortage of targets and doubt the F35 will either.

As for the GE engine, another engine would increase supply chain complexity by at least a factor of 4 and if engine development problems are so common then you would have doubled the chance that at least part of the fleet would be grounded at some point. And to this point the engine has been one of the brighter spots of the F35 development.